Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of system testing, and more particularly to the field of automated quality assurance testing of contact center agent workstation functionality.
Discussion of the State of the Art
As contact center software solutions—whether a single monolithic service or a set multiple service offerings from a number of vendors which together perform all needed tasks—have become more complex, so have systems and techniques to needed monitor and test them. It has become important to have the ability to qualify new software versions and variants on the entire range of hardware types expected to be deployed; to qualify new hardware or software combinations as they arise; and to monitor functional efficiency during events of unacceptable responsiveness under conditions mimicking the actual live usage. These types of test software, running on either dedicated equipment or on live equipment under instances of low live traffic are now available, but are currently inflexible in deployment, requiring significant preplanning and hardware resources, have little modification capability while running, lack the ability to run unobtrusively, and thus cannot be used to diagnose problems encountered during actual call center use, have inflexible result reporting abilities and require a significant amount of programming knowledge to administer.
What is needed are contact center agent workstation testing tools that are easy and flexible to deploy; that accept modifications without the use of complex procedures while running; and that have highly configurable and easily specified reporting formats and that can be deployed through a centralized gateway using simplified runtime commands instead of programming changes to the suites' source code themselves.